


Gronder Meat Skewers

by Maerissa



Series: Fódlan Cookbook [2]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Communication, Cooking, Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:01:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21785644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maerissa/pseuds/Maerissa
Summary: Ingrid and Felix get paired up for kitchen duty.Felix has some opinions on knife management, and the two of them stumble their way onto a topic they've been ignoring in plain sight for too long.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius & Ingrid Brandl Galatea
Series: Fódlan Cookbook [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1570030
Comments: 7
Kudos: 51





	Gronder Meat Skewers

**Author's Note:**

> > ,wdym Felix's yearning for meat isn't a good writing topic
>
>> god if i actually finish this essay before like 11pm i'll happily write 2k of felix meat worship
>
>> ,I'll remind you at 11pm
> 
> [thanks for being the worst influence](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nyoggets)

“I’m going back to the training grounds.”

“No, you’re not.” With a deep, familiar sigh, Ingrid prepared to physically keep Felix from getting away if need be, like she’d used to back in Faerghus.

“There’s no point in me staying,” Felix replied, shooting glances at the kitchen doorway Ingrid was subtly trying to move in front of. “You’re a better cook than me, you actually _like_ cooking, and _I_ have training to do.”

“You know that’s not how kitchen duty works. We’re supposed to get this done together, or it’s going to take forever, and the professor’s going to know something’s wrong.”

“I have ways of avoiding the professor. Now let me leave.”

In response to Felix’s insistence, Ingrid took another step into the door frame to block it. “Yes, _you_ might, but _I_ will be stuck here doing the work of two men.”

“You’re used to that, aren’t you?”

Voice tinged with exasperation, Ingrid shot back. “Goddess, Felix, do you really not feel even the slightest duty to contribute to the community here?”

Felix scoffed. “No. Did you actually think that kind of pathetic argument would work on me?”

“No, but I know that if you were really planning to get out of this, you would be gone by now.”

“...Whatever. Let’s just get it over with,” Felix finally muttered and demonstratively turned his head away.

Ingrid grabbed the box of vegetables next to her and marched up to the kitchen counter, letting herself feel just a little smug about seeing straight through Felix. Dealing with him for so long, through their best and worst moods, clearly did have its upsides every once in a while.

* * *

“Ugh, these knives are a sorry excuse.” Felix couldn’t help but scowl at the state of the cheap, unwieldy carving knife he was trying to evenly slice onions with. He was normally happy that most of the monastery budget went to proper blades and equipment instead of things like kitchen tools, but now that he was holding the result of those priorities in his hand, he really wished someone had cared enough to at least keep it sharp and clean.

“You know, you could’ve just brought your own. You have more than enough polished blades in your room, right?” Ingrid helpfully suggested.

The scowl on Felix’s face stayed put, and he angled his head slightly to make sure Ingrid would see his displeasure.  
“Meant for enemy blood, not… _onion juice_.”

“You can just wipe that off afterwards.” 

“Are you mad? The acidity would cause corrosion straight away, and you could never get it back to wh–” 

Realizing this was almost certainly the exact reaction Ingrid was expecting, he cut himself off mid-rant and looked over to Ingrid’s station. “If you’re that careless about your tools, I have to make sure you’re doing your task properly.”

“I know how to slice meat, Felix. Weren’t you the one who said I was the better cook?” Ingrid replied, and leaned over her cutting board as if to shield her work from Felix’s eyes.

Felix ignored Ingrid’s chiding and took a step towards her, grabbing a chunk of the meat she’d cut up.

“Huh, Gronder fox,” he muttered after turning the piece of meat in his hand. “This is tough, so you need to cut it against the grain.”

“That matters?” Ingrid took a step to the side, and let Felix move closer to the cutting board.

“If you cut it like this, the muscle fibers won’t come apart, so it’ll be too chewy. Look.” He held up the slice to the burning candle mounted on the kitchen wall, and pointed to the long strands of deep red that ran along the surface.

“Huh. You could tell it was fox just by looking at it?”

“Unfortunately. We had it whenever nobles from the Empire were visiting. It tastes like crap without proper seasoning, but of course they didn’t care since it was from _the breadbasket of Fódlan_.”

Ingrid let a “Gross.” slip out, without really knowing whether she was focusing on the lack of taste or the arrogance of putting the origin of a dish before the effort of making it taste nice.

“Symbolism is a shitty spice.”  
Felix grabbed the sturdier-looking knife Ingrid was holding, took a second to mutter about it not being in much better shape than the farce he’d been cutting vegetables with, and let it rest on the surface of the thick slab of meat in front of them.

“And don’t saw, just let it slide through.” 

With a bit more effort than he was used to from Fraldarius-maintained kitchenware, he pushed the knife’s handle down and forward, slicing off a long, neat-looking strip in one decisive motion. “It doesn’t take that much strength. You should be able to do it easily.”

“...Okay, got it,” Ingrid replied, taking the knife back from Felix and slicing the strip into even bite-size chunks. She couldn’t deny that she felt taken aback by his sudden earnestness, but that surprise quickly gave way to tentative appreciation that he wasn’t being as difficult as usual, even in a situation like this.  
“I’ll do that from here on, then. Now, how are those onions coming along?”

* * *

The crackling of the kitchen’s fireplace filled the space with a comforting, familiar ambiance, nearly making Ingrid forget she was supposed to be keeping track of how long the fox skewers had been grilling for.

“Here.”  
Felix reached in and pulled the first skewer out from the flame, nimbly plucked the top still-smoking piece of meat off and handed the rest of the skewer to Ingrid, who got to work on it about as quickly as Felix expected.

“Oh, this is–” As soon as she had bit into the freshly grilled skewer, she went silent and looked over at Felix in shock. The searing flames of the grill had developed a perfect crust over the entire piece of meat – she could see (and be proud of) this from a distance – but she’d been caught completely off guard by the crust giving way to an unexpectedly tender, but still perfectly resistant texture beneath it. It was still much too hot to swallow properly, so she closed her eyes and let the flavour and warmth spread through her, nearly tearing up at how she’d missed this particular taste.

“That’s the salt,” Felix cut in, mouth still audibly busy with the single piece he’d grabbed. “Tough cuts are a pain in the ass, but they– _chew_ – pay off well.”

The contrasts in flavours and textures kept overwhelming her – crispy, firm and yielding in perfect layers, the meat’s natural earthy herbal notes enhanced by mountain salt and lifted in harmony with the fresh onion’s tangy sweetness, cutting through any trace of toughness left in the wild game.

Ingrid swallowed the first piece, and replied “I... haven’t had anything like this in so long–” before nearly cutting herself off to eagerly bite off another piece of meat from the skewer.

“Huh. Fox meat isn’t really exotic, and as the glutton that you are–”

“Come on, Felix,” Ingrid huffed. “While I do… enjoy nice-tasting food, there are still plenty of dishes I haven’t had the… opportunity to try. Yet.”

The slight wavering in Ingrid’s usually so confident voice made Felix pause and dwell on her words for a moment. It didn’t take long to work out what she was skirting around, but Felix would’ve still rather she just said it outright.

“...The famine didn’t give you a lot of options, huh?”

Ingrid just shook her head in response and, with a hint of gourmand reluctance, slid off another chunk of fox meat for Felix.

After a minute of focusing on nothing but the skewers in front of them, Ingrid apprehensively spoke up again, eyes still trained on her dinner.

“Did you… cook a lot together?”

Felix turned his head away from her instinctively, waited a moment to make sure she understood he wasn’t eager to talk about it, then replied. “You didn’t?”

“It… didn’t really come up. He knew I loved good food, but...”

“...We used to do it pretty often. It started with cooking what we got out of hunting that day. So it wouldn’t go to waste. Then, I guess he must have noticed I might have been listening to him for once, and… made it a regular thing.”

Ingrid’s furrowed brow lightened a bit at Felix’s apparent readiness to talk about this shared touchstone of theirs. She absolutely didn’t take it for granted – not with the disasters that these chats had turned into before. He’d lash out at her, hung up on some unresolved gripe that Ingrid’s words had reminded him of, and she’d respond in kind, ashamed of letting Felix’s knowingly hurtful stabs get to her every once in a while. That never happened otherwise – being around people like him for years had let her skin grow thick enough to bounce the odd dagger off – but having to listen to Felix use _his_ memory, _his_ name, just to try to hit her in the heart bothered her much more than she wanted him to be aware of.

  
Felix kept on talking, a welcome distraction to Ingrid’s introspection.  
“He’d pick a new cut of meat every time, and show me what to do with it. Nothing fancy, or we wouldn’t be able to sneak it out from the kitchen.”

“I see,” Ingrid responded, happy to have a more reasonable explanation for Felix’s inexplicable fox muscle knowledge, if nothing else. But now that he was already so freely delving into his memories, maybe this conversation wouldn’t go the same as the past failures that kept playing in her mind, even if she...

She let her words hang in the air for a while before asking what a part of her absolutely had to, her voice now much less steady.

“Do… do you think he would’ve been happy? With this?” she asked cautiously, gesturing to the meat in front of her but unsure how far ‘this’ really stretched in her mind.

She’d expected to wait long – perhaps forever – for the next word from Felix, but he replied almost instantly.

“...I guess.”

 _I guess_? Nothing snide or hurtful, but an earnest reply? As unused as she was to hearing something like this from Felix of all people, the overwhelming relief at his words opened for a wave of contrasting emotions. Inexplicable flustering crashed against nostalgic visions of less strained times, silenced by the thought that maybe she’d already known this was how their conversation would turn out.

Without any time to prepare a suitable reaction, Ingrid just allowed her tensed muscles to relax and took a deep breath, letting her mind fill up with the sound and soft glow of the fireplace beside them. Unsurprisingly, Felix didn’t seem to mind the silence.

* * *

As she was handing the first of the trays of meat skewers through the window to the dining hall, Ingrid turned her head and called out to Felix, who’d already gotten started on the washing-up.   
“You know, this actually turned out really well. Good work today!”

“...Yeah, you too.”

As usual, she had about ten different pointed remarks ready to offer to Felix’s prompted compliment – “ _finally acknowledging you appreciate my company?_ ” – and could already predict his snappy comeback and the banter that would inevitably follow. 

So, to save them both the time and effort, she kept her lips sealed and merely grinned at the back of Felix’s turned-away head, confident that hidden behind the mess of blue hair and dish soap was a smile just as genuine as her own.


End file.
